I almost titled this post 'Value still, yes still, suck at product activation', anyway here goes...

So, my copy of Brink arrived in the post yesterday, one day before the game's official UK street release date and like any rabid gamer hungry for the next big thing I eagerly pop the DVD in my PC's optical drive hoping to play it.

Up pops the Steam installer, 'OH NOES' I immediately think to myself, another game to be ruined by Valve's flakey online service.  And sure enough, within seconds of typing in my CD key into the computer my prediction comes true.   No suprise there then. *sigh*

So what's wrong this time then?  Well, pretty much the same as last time I bought a Steam game, in that yet again you can activate the product, but not install it from the DVD in the drive, you just see 'This product cannot be installed because it is not released'.

But, and here's the rub, you CAN click the 'Pre-Load' button in the steam games list after activating the product to download it from the internet EVEN THOUGH THE DVD IS IN THE DVD DRIVE!

"I know", some guy at Valve says, "before the day a game is allowed to be played let's allow users to download games from our servers rather than allowing them to install it from the official DVD that they might have been sent in the post - bandwith is free right?"

NO VALVE YOU FUCKTARDS!

It'll slow the internet down for everyone! Are you stupid or what?

And then Valve wonder why the their network is slow when new games are released - it's because your servers are crippled by users unnecessarily downloading games that are in their DVD drives!

Valve, you still, after all this time, really, really, can't code for shit...

So, I've got an external HDD that's got my music on it. I fire up iTunes, listen to some music. Great.  I take my HDD home with me and forget to bring it with me the next day.  I fire up iTunes at work to listen to some files on my laptop's HDD.  Next day I bring my portal HDD back in with me and try to listen to some tunes but find that iTunes has DELETED THEM!

WTF!

Apple, when you're entrusted to look after a user's files the first thing you should do is NOT DELETE THEM!

It took me a while to figure out what had deleted them, I thought maybe my HDD was corrupt or something at first, but after loadingup the iTunes Music Library.xml file and looking at the order of files and comparing the remaining contents of my portable HDD to it I discovered that iTunes had started at the top of the list and worked it's way down deleting every file as it went.  Luckily for me it stopped after about 200 albums or so and I had a backup.

What's worse, this isn't even an old problem, just search google for 'iTunes deleted my music' and you'll find many upset users with the same problem dating back to as early as 2006! However, unlike other users that have had their files deleted I don't own an iPod nor do I sync my music with any device.  My guess it that at some point after disconnecting the portable HDD on the first day and restarting iTunes on the second day it decided to scan my collection and determined the files were 'missing'.  On the third day after reconnecting the HDD and restarting iTunes for some reason decided to delete the missing files!  Very very strange and very very broken!

Apple, this time I award you with the golden steaming turd - you REALLY can't code for shit...

 

... is either lying or has never tried to create something even vaguely professional with it.

 

It's so amazingly frustrating to use I don't even know where to being slating it.  Suffice to say it's just bad.  Avoid it like the plague.

 

Open office devs - you can't code for shit!

So, here I am with some icons on my desktop and I want to align them nicely, as any tidy person would. So I go looking for an 'Align Icons' option on the desktop context menu.

I find something called 'Clean Up', as below.



Not being sure if this will send my selected icons to the trash or what I decide to click it anyway.  Oh nice, all my icons got aligned to a grid.  Perfect.  Now if only there was a way to always align them to a grid.  So I go looking for a 'Snap to grid' option.

Hmm, not on the context menu (above), let's have a look in 'View options'.

Hmm, not there either.

I know, since this is an Apple and you have to 'Think differently'* I'll go look for it in places I'd never expect to find it in a sane world.

Oh look, here it is:



'Arrange by name', 'Arrange by size', etc.  They all make sense but 'Arrange by Snap to grid'  what kind of arragement is that?

Wait a second though, let's take a look at the context menu again:



So why isn't it on the desktop context menu in the same place?

The solution, Apple, and anyone else who was wondering.  Is to create a checkbox which says 'Snap to grid' and only then enable the drop-down menu for sorting because you can't rearrange icons, which you have to if you sort them, unless you want icon alignment to occur.  Next the 'None' and the dividers in the 'View options menu could also be removed, which would simplify the UI and the user experience.  Not to mention it would all make sense in plain English too.  Also, the desktop context menu should have a checkable item for 'Snap to grid' next to 'Clean up'.

Apple, you can't code for shit...

* Steve Job's marketing teams's term for "It's shit and wrong and we won't change it as we'll appear as being wrong to much and we're Apple and we're never wrong"
 

I sumitted this annoying bug report to apple today.

The attachment column reports incorrect attachment count.

Steps to repeat:

1) user A emails user B a file
2) user A forwards the same email, but without attachments, to user B.
3) User B received email sent in (2), Subject has "FW: "prefixed to it.
4) User B selects "View/Organize by thread" from the menu.
5) Observe that attachment column shows "2 items"
6) Expand the thread and observe that each message that is part of this thread shows "1 item".

Here's a screen shot, note that only the first emails in each conversation thread actually included attachments:

The only place on apple's website i could find to submit a bug report as on a "feedback" page, here: www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html.  Not that I could find a link TO that page - I only found that via a google search. 

Also,  the feedback page doesn't say if I'll get a reference number for this report or wether I'll be able to follow up on it..  Great Apple, just great - I'm left wondering whether my report will go unnoticed, whether it'll ever be fixed and if they'll even acknowledge it.

Apple, you really can't code for shit...

So, Valve have outdone themselves this time.  They've managed to break the installation of CoD: MW2 on many people's pcs.  Were we asked if we wanted the update? No.  Were we asked if we wanted to apply it now?  No.  Can I play the game that I bought?  No.

 

 

Thanks Valve, you really can't code for shit...

So I came to install Call Of Duty 6 so I could play it after midnight tonight, but alas you can't even install it, let alone play it due to the product activation which requires steam!

What bugged me even more is the multitude of different, confusing or misleading 'error' messages that you get when you even try to install the game before the time that you're allowed to actually play it

Take this one for example:



"Sorry, but the following items are not available for purchase in this country.  Your purchase has been cancelled."

There's so many things wrong with this dialog:

1) The message appears above a box in which has no title.  It should be titled 'Products'
2) The product listed is incorrect.  It reads "Steam" when it should actually read "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2"
3) I wasn't trying to purchase anything.  I already paid my money to the retailer who in return posted me a DVD and a CD Key in the post.
4) I certainly wasn't trying to purchase a product called "Steam", a) steam is free, b) I wouldn't ever pay for steam!
5) The title of the dialog is "Product activation wizard" but it doesn't correspond to the contents of the dialog.
6) It says "Not available" above the error message.  That's a lie, it is available, the DVD is in my drive right now!
7) The only options you then have are "< Back" and "Cancel", an "Install now and I'll activate it later" would be nice.

As a good friend of mine would say.  "OMFG!, Seriously, WTF?"

This is how I would fix it.

1) Allow consumers to install games from physical media so they can activate it whenever they like.  Installing from Physical media should always be allowed, activation is the only thing publishers need to prevent if they need to prevent anything at all.
2) Show useful error messages, how about "Sorry, you cannot activate [insert correct product name here] at this time, please try after [insert date and timezone here]".

Not only is steam product activation annoying, filled with errors and headaches it also prevents you, Mr Consumer, from reselling the game you just bought?  Why?  Well the CD Key that comes with the game is then tied to your steam account and steam accounts and purchases are non transferrable.  If anyone other then you tried to use the CD Key again they won't be able to use it!

Product activation in this form is simply an attempt to stomp all over the second hand games market.  And for that, I declare that Steam sucks, Valve sucks

And quickly, while I've got someone's attention having no public/private/clan dedicated servers also sucks!

Valve, you really can't code for shit.

One of the things that really drives me mad when using OSX and Linux is the inconsistencies in keyboard shortcuts and menus between applications, I'm sure I'm not the only one bothered by this.

There are two main areas that I find to have problems:

1) Switching and cycling between tabs in applications that have a tabbed user interface

Almost every application I've tried has a different keyboard shortcut and different menu item to select between tabs, even applications from the same publisher have different shortcut keys!
Here's a list to demonstrate:
Safari, Window/Select next tab, ctrl + tab
Terminal, Window/Select next tab, cmd + }
Text Mate, Navigation/Next file tab, cmd + alt + right arrow
iTerm, Window/Select next tab, cmd + right arrow
Firefox, No menu items!, cmd + tab to cycle tables, cmd + alt + right arrow
Eclipse, Window/Navigation/Next editor, cmd + f6

It's almost impossible to remember what keyboard shortcut you should be pressing and you often end up either losing work or moving the cursor/focus to somewhere that you didn't intend.

2) cursor positioning and text selection

Some applications use the standard home/end keys to go to the start and end of the line, others use them to go to the top and bottom of the document
Some applications use the page up/page up keys to go up and down a page, some use them to go to the top or bottom of the document
Some applications use cmd + cursor keys to go to the start and end of a line, other applications use the keys to do something completely different.

Ok, so those are the problems I see, what can we establish to make things better?

1) Use the examples found in the applications made by the same company that makes the operating system and/or refer to their guide.  In apple's case they have made multiple applications with different keyboard shortcuts, in such a case I'd look at the keyboard shortcuts in the most popular applications (in their case, Safari) and go with the same menu options and keyboard shortcuts.

If you need to navigate tabs in order and cycle between them then please use 'ctrl' (or 'cmd' on a mac keyboard) + tab and use a modifier key and the cursor left/right keys to move between tabs in order.  I'd suggest using just one modifier key, preferrably 'alt' + arrow key.

2) use the standard windows conventions for cursor positioning and page navigation - many Mac and Linux users use Windows keyboards that actually have 'Home', 'End', 'Page Up', 'Page Down':
* Pressing 'Home' should go to the start of a line
* Pressing 'End' should go to the end of a line
* Pressing 'PgDn' should move page the document down one page, if the document is editable the cursor/caret should also move.
* Pressing 'PgUp' should move page the document up one page, if the document is editable the cursor/caret should also move.
* Pressing 'Shift + PgUp' should select a page worth of text before the cursor (or other document elements) and move the cursor to the start of the selection.
* Pressing 'Shift + PgDn' should select a page worth of text after the cursor (or other document elements) and move the cursor to the start of the selection.
* Pressing 'Shift + Home' should select all the text before the cursor to the start of the line and move the cursor to the start of the line
* Pressing 'Shift + End' should select all the text before the after to the end of the line and move the cursor to the end of the line
* Pressing 'Ctrl' (or 'cmd' on a mac keyboard) + 'Home' should move the cursor to the start of the document
* Pressing 'Ctrl' (or 'cmd' on a mac keyboard) + 'End' should move the cursor to the start of the document
* Pressing 'Ctrl' (or 'cmd' on a mac keyboard) + 'Shift' + 'Home' should select all the text in the document before the cursor and move the cursor to the start of the document
* Pressing 'Ctrl' (or 'cmd' on a mac keyboard) + 'Shift' + 'End' should select all the text in the document after the cursor and move the cursor to the start of the document

If you want to support other key combinations for text selection then please add those in ADDITION to the standard ones above.

Doing so will make it easy for everyone to use any application regardless of the operating system.

Windows Live For Games and Valve's Left For Dead both have major issues if the network card you use to connect to the internet as more than one IP addresses assigned to it.

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After a year or two of owning this domain name i finally dragged myself away from my code and suffered some system administration duties and have now setup this blog which I hope you and many other future readers will enjoy!